Thoughts from the developers

Main menu

We are heading off to the NYC Maker Faire again this year, but this time we plan to have our Kickstarter launched soon after! We also want to sell a few early bird packages to get our sensors into the hands of a few users so we’ve been working on making our website more presentable. I don’t really have anything else to say other than that, so I’ll just throw in some pictures of Mr. Howard here; he’s so photogenic!

We’re planning on using the MSPG2553 on our basestations, called RPIPs, but we want to use Ethernet as our backhual to send data to the cloud so I’ve working on getting DHCP and DNS working with the Wiznet Arduino shield. The wonderful mess of wires in the photo is my working prototype (an MSPG2553 on the launchpad board and a Wiznet 5100 shield). Woo!

I’ll be cleaning up the code so that I can publish it on Owl Platform’s github, and we’re finalizing the hardware designed of the receivers. We’ll be using these new receivers when we launch our system, but other people may also get some use out of them since they’ll be pin compatible with Arduino shields while also have on-board radios. This would help people who are looking to migrate from the Arduino to the MSP since they could still use all of the Arduino shields that they’ve bought and worked with before, but with the MSP and an already wired and tested radio design.

We’re just starting day two of the 2013 Bay Area maker faire! We had a lot of fun yesterday meeting lots of people as they came by. Plenty of people are asking us how we are different from other sensing and Internet of Things groups — and given how many groups there are I totally understand the confusion!

The Owl Platform philosophy has two important ideas. First, people should be able to just unpack a sensor from a box, stick it somewhere, and forget about it. This means that sensors should be ready to use straight from the box and shouldn’t require constant maintenance, which is why the multi-year lifetime of our sensors is so important!

Our second main idea is that people want to program sensor data, not the sensor! Programming a sensor is a real pain — you need to worry about interrupts, wireless networking, battery consumption, and a lot of other details that don’t matter to your goal. Owl Platform’s network API let’s you get right to working with your sensor data so you can get right to making the sensor application you want. Our API is so simple that many of our apps can be written in 50 line Ruby scripts!

Check out the open source implementation of our API in C++, Java, and Ruby at github.com/OwlPlatform and read more about our system at www.owlplatform.com/developers.php